The times were very much like the ones we are in now, people out of work, people leaving the state in search of jobs, people worried, so worried, about what was coming next.

People afraid for their future.

The clouds of unemployment hung heavy in our town, enveloping entire neighborhoods and families until the number of people who weren't working reached crisis level and brought us the kind of national attention we were used to getting only for outrageous snowfalls and wind chill factors.

When the unemployment rate reached close to 21 percent in 1983, we felt the scrutiny of the outside world; and a sense of sorrow at what we had become.

Here at The Chronicle, we knew we needed to do more than the old-school reporting of statistics or the traditional statements to the press about the latest plant closings.

We needed to hold a mirror up to the community and see who we really were. We needed to tell the stories of people who thought if they worked hard, like their dads and uncles and generations of others before them, they'd always have a job, that they could provide a better life for their children, that they were more than a statistic in a column of numbers.

It was a relatively new concept back then for newspapers, but we felt called to show the effects of unemployment on people struggling to survive, working to find new ways in a new world.

We started with the kinds of stories we've come to count on in our current economy: how to stretch grocery dollars, how to cut heating bills, how to save for your kids' college, how to do more with less.

We followed families through the transition while the dads went through re-training programs or looked for new jobs, and the moms entered the paid work force for the first time, and kids went without their allowances because everyone was called on to sacrifice.

But the reporting was never just about facts and figures.

It was also about the truth of the human spirit.

During the course of one interview about how to make a house more energy efficient and what funds were available to install new windows and doors in aging homes, the conversation turned philosophical, far from government programs and public funds.

The agency director set aside the usual who, what, why, where and when of newspapering -- and got to the heart of the matter. There were people suffering because of the economy, she said, and it wasn't those who were usually in the news: the factory owners, the employees, the city fathers and the few city mothers then in power.

It was the children.

"How do you raise a child to believe in hope?" she asked that day, in that time.

If the parents were scrapping to make a living, if they weren't sure they could keep a roof overhead, if they were beside themselves with worry about where their next meal was going to come from, how could they pass on the inheritance of hope to the next generation? It is a question to ask once again as we work our way through a new set of economic clouds toward a new day.

And it reminds us there is always more to the story than facts and figures; there is the necessity of hope.